Blunderbuss and A-Through-L looked eagerly at each other.
“If we examine the evidence,” Ell began.
“And retrace our steps,” continued the wombat.
“The Marquess has it,” they said together, and with finality.
“What?” September cried. “She can’t! It’s too soon! I didn’t even get a chance! Do you know where she is? Can we get it back from her?”
Saturday blinked slowly in the sun. He hadn’t said a word for a long while. The Marid shook his head from side to side like a dazed bull. He sighed, sat down on the black sand, and put his hands in his lap. And then he said an awful thing:
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Who is the Marquess?”
September’s eyes widened and a whole rush of words scrambled over themselves to get out of her first, but she didn’t get a chance to say any single one of them. The black sand beneath them tilted sickeningly. The coconut trees began to swing wildly back and forth. Then the thirsthorn hedges burst into showers of fresh water. Then the floatberry brambles snapped and rolled down the beachhead. Ell and Blunderbuss began to run, and then lift off into the air. Whatever was coming, they did not want it to catch them!
A great dark shape broke the sands like a whale’s back breaking the waves. September could not think of anything to compare it to. As big as the Briary. As big as the Jarlhopp’s mines below the world. As big as a newborn moon. Chunks of hard, sharp red crystal covered the shape, a red so deep it looked black until the sun hit it and sent a dizzying dance of maroon prisms bouncing through the air. But beneath the red-black diamond nuggets, soft, sleek fur stuck out like grass breaking through cobblestones to grow in the sun. The shape shuddered and disappeared beneath the sand.
When it rose again, the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern seized them all in its impossible mouth and dove deep down into the earth.
CHAPTER XIV
A DETOUR THROUGH VOLEWORLD
In Which September Rides a Greatvole under the World, Saturday Cuts His Hair, and Blunderbuss Loses Several Toes
You and I have traveled together often, to places both odd and outlandish—and sometimes spectacular. We are no strangers to the underground! We have run headlong down to Fairyland-Below and learned to like it there! We danced in the capital and had tea with a Minotaur. We have no fear of the dark or the deep! I’d wager you didn’t even gasp when the Greatvole snatched up September and her friends and dove beneath the sand! Instead, you clapped your hands and said: Oh, I am glad! Fairyland-Below is a very exciting place and I shall be happy to see it again!
But voles, even Greatvoles, do not live in Fairyland-Below.
Let us think of Fairyland as a staggeringly magnificent cake, one with three layers and far too many frosting flowers and glacé strawberries and fondant ripples and flaming plums all over it. Let us take a great swaggering knife between us—it will take both our hands—and slice it open to see what we can see inside. For that is all a story is, my dears: a knife that cuts the world into pieces small enough to eat.
All that icing and candied madness on top is the land we’ve wandered through so far, Pandemonium and the Autumn Provinces and Meridian and even the Whelk of the Moon. Below that we should find a scrumptious dark slab of cakey chocolate earth where folk can plant their carrot seeds and pear trees. If we cut deeper, we should find another slab, thick and moist and full of shadowy sugar and delicious adventures, and that is Fairyland-Below. Further and farther than that, we should at last come to the last morsels of cake: the rock and magma and the very sort of hot, spinning core you’ve seen in your geography classes. Of course, in Fairyland, the core is not only a superheated ball of magnetized metals, but also the Nickelodeon, a red-hot city of lavalings living the lavish life.
Perhaps you have now realized that voles and other creatures of the Digging Class would not dive all the way down to the sparkling cities of Fairyland-Below. They chew through the earthy cake where seeds sprout and worms and beetles and pill bugs and ants and grubs and anything else that loves to crawl crawls their best. The Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern swam through the earth like a cuttlefish through the water. Her paws paddled gracefully through the loam and the clay. Her tail swept back and forth with the powerful rhythm of a shark. The Greatvole moved so fast you and I would hardly glimpse her passing, the way subway trains clip by in the dark so quick that all you catch is a long stripe of light. And so September opened her mouth to scream—and only got a single horrid gulp of dirt before the dark, wet mud vanished and they could all see and breathe quite easily again.